Forget Paris: OpenStack is not a cheap alternative to VMware

Linux-type vibe is great, though

Storagebod It’s an unusual month which sees me travel to two conferences, but it happened in October, and there's still a part of me that wishes I was on the road again and off to the OpenStack Summit in Paris.

At the moment, it seems OpenStack has the real momentum and it would have been interesting to compare and contrast it with VMworld.

There does seem to be a huge overlap in attending vendors, and even the people, but OpenStack feels like it's the more vibrant community. And as the OpenStack services continue to extend and expand, it seems that it is a community that is only going to grow and eventually embrace all aspects of infrastructure.

But I have a worry that some people are looking at OpenStack as a cheaper alternative to VMware; it’s not, it’s a long way off that, and hopefully it’ll never be that. OpenStack needs to be looked as a different way of deploying infrastructure and applications, not to virtualise your legacy applications.

I'm sure at some point we'll see case studies where someone has virtualised their exchange infrastructure on it. But for every success in virtualising legacy, there are going to be countless failures.

If you want an alternative to VMware for your legacy, Hyper-V is probably it and it may be cheaper in the short-term. Hyper-V is still woefully ignored by man, lacking in cool and credibility but it is certainly worth considering as an alternative. Microsoft has done a good job, and you might want to whisper this but I hear good things from people I trust about Azure.

Still, OpenStack has that Linux-type vibe, and with every Tom, Dick and Harriet offering their own distribution, it feels very familiar. I wonder which distribution is going to be RedHat and which is going to be Yggdrasil. ®